Cooling measures gloom Singapore’s private residential market outlook

Private residential transactions may decline up to 29% YoY in 2022.

The private residential market may have been the best performing sector amongst Singapore’s property sector in 2021 with up to 34,000 recorded transactions—but this will not be the case for 2022, Knight Frank claimed. No thanks to the cooling measures imposed by the government to stabilise prices.

Unit transactions for 2021 saw a 60% increase from the over 21,000 units transacted in the previous year. With the demand rising, the prices for the sector rose 10.6%.

“This was also due to the organic owner-occupier demand at most levels of society in Singapore,” Leonard Tay, Head of Research at Knight Frank Singapore, told Singapore Business Review in an exclusive interview.

However, the Singapore government announced new measures towards the end of the year to “cool the property market and prevent the prices from running away” Tay said. These measures include the raising of the Additional Buyer’s Stamp Duty (ABSD).

“The imposition of cooling measures announced in December last year has kind of clouded the private residential real estate market outlook after the strong run it had from the end of the circuit breaker of 2020 right through the whole year of 2021,” he said.